Cosmological Applications of Gravitational Lensing

It was recognized very early that the gravitational lens effect can be used as an efficient cosmological tool. Of the many researchers who foresaw the use of lensing, F. Zwicky and S. Refsdal should be explicitly mentioned. The perhaps most accurate predictions and foresights by these two authors are as follows: Zwicky estimated the probability that a distant object is multiply imaged to be about 1/400, and thus that the observation of this effect is “a certainty” [73] – his value, which was obtained by a very crude reasoning, is in fact very close to current estimates of the lensing probability of high-redshift QSOs. He predicted that the magnification caused by gravitational light deflection will allow a “deeper look” into the universe –in fact, the spectroscopy of very faint galaxies which are imaged into giant luminous arcs have yielded spectral information which would be very difficult to obtain without these ‘natural telescopes’. And third, Zwicky saw that gravitational lenses may be used to determine the mass of distant extragalactic objects[72] – in fact, the mass determination of clusters masses from giant luminous arcs is as least as accurate as other methods, but does not rely on special assumptions (like spherical symmetry, virial or thermal equilibrium) inherent in other methods, and the determination of the mass within the inner 0.9 arcseconds of the lensing galaxy in the quadruple QSO 2237+0305 to within 2% [52] is the most accurate extragalactic mass determination known. Refsdal predicted the use of gravitational lenses for determining cosmological parameters and for testing cosmological theories [48][49] – we shall return to these issues below.